The Department of Veterans Affairs forwarded letters to no less than 1,800 veterans this week, sending a word of warning that they might have been exposed to a host of blood-borne diseases, whilst they had been going through dental work at the city's Cochran V. A. medical center.

The letters, which typify the risk of exposure as inferior, state that the source of the possible contamination was dental equipment that might not have been cleaned appropriately.

They offer free blood testing for H. I. V., hepatitis B, and hepatitis C to 1,812 veterans treated at the John Cochran Division of the center from Feb. 1, 2009, to March 11, 2010.

In addition to that they said that the association is trying to take all the essential steps to make sure that testing is offered rapidly, and results communicated in given time and that employees at the center were doing almost everything possible to take care of this situation and prevent it from occurring yet again.

This is not the foremost occasion that the St. Louis center has had faced problems with unhygienic medical equipment.

A report in last April by the Inspector General of the V. A. identified current troubles with contaminated endoscopes at the hospital, noting that inspectors established that rags and throwaway gloves were scattered around and that there were no defined clean and unclean areas in the hospital's sterilization segment.